Bioethics Forum Essay

Priced Out of Publishing in Bioethics Journals

After several decades of being a prolific bioethicist, I am no longer sure I can afford to be in the field. The high price of practice is not a new topic in this field, Saba Fatima wrote about the prohibitive expense of conferences and I posted on the structural injustice of the academic conference. Leah Pierson described the financial barriers in entering the field. Economic gatekeeping has now come for academic publishing in bioethics.

This spring, I joined the editorial board of an open-access journal. However, given the four-digit publication fee, I will never be able to publish there. Recently, another mainstay bioethics journal, which published one of my very first papers, has gone open access and the publication fee starts in the thousands.

The promise of open access was to make academic literature available to everyone. Thus, anyone could read the results of studies or bioethical analyses without hitting a paywall. Knowledge for all overcame problems of equity and access to articles behind paywalls —those from schools with modest funding, from lower- and middle-income countries, and from institutions without an expensive subscription package could access the literature. When federal funders and some foundations began to require open-access publishing for grantees, this utopian ideal of learning-for-all seemed to be within reach.

But the piper must be paid. Publishing journals, even virtual journals, cost money. Most publishers are not in the business of losing money and if people reading articles would not pay them, then who would?

Open-access publishing might be better termed open-access reading, because now the publishing part is only open to those who can pay. Publishing in an open-access journal can cost from $1,000 to $10,000 per article. Some journals even charge a submission fee to review a manuscript. Most journals offer discounts or waivers to people from lower- or middle-income countries, fellows and postdocs, and employees of institutions with open-access publishing contracts, but these passes are not available to those of us at less resourced U.S. schools.

I work at a private university with a teaching mission. Our endowment is politely described as modest. The vast majority of our budget comes from tuition. Our faculty each receives $1,500 per year for travel and professional development. Membership fees are not covered. This amount does not cover presenting at a single domestic conference each year. Nor does that amount cover the cost of publishing one article in most open- access journals. In short, unless I pay out of pocket, I can’t publish open access. I recently co-authored an article with seven people, and all of us wanted it to be published open access, but none of our five universities provided funding or had an open-access publishing agreement for us to do so.

To be sure, not all publications have or will go open access, but it has turned out to be lucrative for publishers. One study estimates that the shift to open access has increased profits at major academic publishers. This model also incentivizes journals to publish more manuscripts regardless of the quality: The more they publish, the more money the journals make. The potential for even reputable publishers to act like predatory outlets is strong and concerning.

Even for those with external grants, consider that money budgeted for publishing costs is money that won’t be available to pay for research. In recognizing this concern, the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation recently announced that its funds cannot be used for these charges. Perhaps universities can take the money they saved by cutting their budgets for library journal collections (often replaced by open-access materials) and use it to pay publication and submission fees. In the end, the publishers get paid, and the academy has simply shifted costs from one pot to another.

Most academic authors recognize that our hard work goes without remuneration—we give our writing and peer-review away to others who profit from it. This arrangement does not change with open access, but now we pay for the privilege of letting others read our work. One can easily see a near future when only researchers from well-resourced schools will be able to publish in the bioethics literature.

Where will the majority of academics publish? Perhaps entrepreneurs will launch discounted publishers (think Dollar Store journals), personal blogs, or preprint servers. The Gates Foundation requires researchers to share preprints of their articles before peer-review or even editor review. Such outlets may be considered “lesser” in terms of faculty promotion and the increased potential for fraud and mistakes in the literature. For those of us at teaching-focused schools, maybe we simply won’t be able to publish in high-quality journals.

Or we could demand something more truly inclusive. We could boycott the commercial, for-profit, publishers and work on developing high-quality, nonprofit outlets such as has happened in independent, local journalism. We could base faculty merit on something other than simple metrics like number of publications and journal rankings. We could demand that reviewers and writers get a piece of this lucrative pie so that we are not writing and reviewing for free. If nothing changes, the continued narrowing of the field and its limited voices identified in Pierson et al.’s recent study will continue until bioethics is a practice of the few and ignored by the many.

Craig Klugman, PhD, is the Vincent de Paul Professor of Bioethics and Health Humanities at DePaul University. @CraigKlugman